Last night’s Open House featured a talk by Kootenay Shambhala Centre Director Lynn Dragone, who recently returned to Nelson after spending 10 months at Gampo Abbey.

Lynn led a roomful of participants in an exploration of the meaning of renunciation in three contexts: getting to the meditation cushion, being on the cushion, and the rest of life.

Click on the icon below to listen to the recording. To hear the discussion participants adequately, listen with headphones.

Download “Renunciation,” with Lynn Dragone (MP3: 49 MB; 53 min)

LYNN DRAGONE brings to her teaching over 20 years of practice and study in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition and passion for discovering what it is to be fully human.

Tonight, for the second time in as many weeks, Acharya Allyn Lyon drew a large crowd to the Kootenay Shambhala Centre’s Monday Open House. In her talk, titled “Shambhala: A Buddhist Shamanic Journey for Modern Times,” she spoke about a path of working with the energies of the world to restore balance in an age of rampant materialism. Click on the icon below to listen to her talk.

Download “Shambhala: A Buddhist Shamanic Journey for Modern Times,” with Acharya Allyn Lyon (MP3: 53 MB; 58 min)

ALLYN LYON was appointed an acharya in 2000, after several years serving as Director of Shambhala Mountain Center and in other Shambhala administrative positions. Since then she has been traveling and teaching while creating a home base in Tepotzlan, Mexico, where she is the resident acharya. Her main interest in teaching dharma is the nature of mind and how it functions: “What is mind? How does practice work with mind? What is real?” But if there’s a bottom line, Allyn says, “it’s that I really enjoy practicing the dharma, teaching and sharing my love of the dharma with students.” For more about Acharya Lyon, click here.

Visiting senior teacher Acharya Allyn Lyon gave tonight’s Open House talk, speaking about reasons one might choose to meditate (to develop peace, to explore the nature of mind, or to discover the world’s richness, for instance) and generally entertaining the large audience with her characteristic earthiness and humour. Click on the icon below to listen to her talk.

Download “Why Meditate?” with Acharya Allyn Lyon (MP3: 39.4 MB; 43 min)

ALLYN LYON was appointed an acharya in 2000, after several years serving as Director of Shambhala Mountain Center and in other Shambhala administrative positions. Since then she has been traveling and teaching while creating a home base in Tepotzlan, Mexico, where she is the resident acharya. Her main interest in teaching dharma is the nature of mind and how it functions: “What is mind? How does practice work with mind? What is real?” But if there’s a bottom line, Allyn says, “it’s that I really enjoy practicing the dharma, teaching and sharing my love of the dharma with students.” For more about Acharya Lyon, click here.

At last night’s Open House, in the lead-up to the introduction of our new core curriculum (starting with Shambhala Training Level I in less than two weeks), Sally Albert spoke about the nature, origin and purpose of the Shambhala teachings, and about the changes that the new curriculum will bring to the presentation of these teachings. Click on the icon below to listen to her talk.

Download “The Way of Shambhala: Path of the Warrior,” with Sally Albert (MP3: 33.3 MB; 36 min)

SALLY ALBERT has been a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche for about 30 years. She serves at the Kootenay Shambhala Centre as a meditation instructor and teacher and the Shambhala Training Resident Director. She enjoys living on rural land, growing a garden and relating to her lovely grandchildren.

In last night’s Open House talk, the third in a three-part series presenting an overview of the Shambhala Buddhist path, teacher David Marshall reviewed the first two talks and discussed the distinguishing features of vajrayana Buddhism in general and Shambhala Buddhism in particular. Click on the icon below to listen to the talk.

Download “Celebrating Everyday Life,” with David Marshall (MP3: 44.9 MB; 49 min)

DAVID MARSHALL is a student of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, and has been a practitioner of Shambhala Buddhism since 1997. He has taught meditation and various Buddhist classes within Shambhala and to college students, social workers and prisoners.

In a talk at last night’s Kootenay Shambhala Centre Open House, senior teacher Russell Rodgers led participants in an exploration of the cultural and perceptual underpinnings of current ecological problems and described three Buddhist practices for addressing these problems at their root. Click on the icon below to listen to the talk.

Download “Buddhism and Deep Ecology,” with Russell Rodgers (MP3: 57.5 MB; 1 hr, 3 min)

To explore this topic more fully, please join us for this year’s annual Kootenay public one-week meditation retreat at our retreat land near Nelson, from June 27th to July 5th. A full program description is available on our Kootenay Public Weekthün 2009: Touching the Earth page.

Lisa Hill (with partner Julian Gonzales) coordinates Awake in Action, the Vancouver Shambhala Centre’s social action arm. She gave an hour-long talk on the group’s history, organization and activity to some thirty people at the Kootenay Shambhala Centre’s Open House on May 18th. Click on the icon below to listen to her talk.

Download “Awake in Action,” with Lisa Hill (MP3: 54 MB; 59 min)

Lisa has volunteered for WISH, a drop-in centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which serves women and transgendered people working in the sex trade, and for Vancouver’s Citywide Housing Coalition on the issues of inadequate housing and homelessness. She aspires to raise awareness of the personal and societal benefits of mindfulness-awareness meditation. She gratefully acknowledges Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and His Holiness the 17th Karmapa for their compassionate encouragement to all of us to take an active roll in caring for the world.